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Lyndon B. Johnson: Lyndon Johnson
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Johnson had lost control of the Democratic party, which was splitting into four factions, each of which despised the other three. The first comprised Johnson (and Humphrey), labor unions, and local party bosses (led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley). The second group comprised students and intellectuals who were vociferously against the war, and rallied behind McCarthy. The third group comprised Catholics and blacks; they rallied behind Robert Kennedy. The fourth group was traditional white Southerners, who rallied behind George C. Wallace and his third party. Vietnam was one of many issues that splintered the party and Johnson could see no way to unite the party long enough for him to win reelection.
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Johnson reported to General Douglas MacArthur in Australia. Johnson and two Army officers went to the base of the 22nd Bomb Group, which was assigned the high risk mission of bombing the Japanese airbase at Lae on New Guinea. A colonel took Johnson's original seat on the one bomber; it was shot down and everyone died. The B-26 Marauder Johnson was on was ... attacked by Japanese fighter-planes but survived. MacArthur awarded LBJ the Silver Star, the military's third-highest medal, for his actions.
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Politically, Johnson closely watched the public opinion polls. His goal was not to adjust his policies to follow opinion, but rather to adjust opinion to support his policies. Until the Tet Offensive of 1968, he systematically downplayed the war: few speeches, no rallies or parades or advertising campaigns. He feared that publicity would charge up the hawks who wanted victory, and weaken both his containment policy and his higher priorities in domestic issues. Jacobs and Shapiro conclude, "Although Johnson held a core of support for his position, the president was unable to move Americans who held hawkish and dovish positions." Polls showed that beginning in 1965, the public was consistently 40-50% hawkish and 10-25% dovish. and take it out on you."
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Johnson was elected to Congress in a special election in 1937 as a New Deal Democrat, and remained in the House until 1949. In 1941 he was defeated in a special election for the U.S. Senate. He was the first member of Congress to go into active duty during World War II, winning a Silver Star for gallantry in action when his plane was fired upon in the South Pacific. In July 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all legislators in active service to report back to Congress, and Johnson returned to the House.
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Johnson began recording his phone conversations within hours of becoming president. On the night he returned from Dallas on November 22, 1963, LBJ spent about three hours in his vice presidential office in the Executive Office Building. He already had a recording device attached to a phone there, and used it when he called Kennedy loyalists such as Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, and the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, Richard Maguire. From that night to the last days of his presidency in 1969, Johnson recorded more than 9,000 of his conversations.
Johnson, having pushed through what he considered Kennedy's bill, now went to work on his own legislative program. He began with the Economic Opportunity Act, the first salvo of a concerted "war on poverty," as he called it, that would become one of the hallmarks of his presidency. The act, signed into law on 20 August 1964, was funded with an appropriation of $948 million. It eventually authorized ten programs under the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) established as part of the White House office. The programs included a "domestic Peace Corps" to operate in depressed areas of the country, known as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA); the Job Corps, designed as a make-work program for the hard-core unemployed; Head Start, to help deprived children compensate for their cultural disadvantages; and community-action programs to give poor people a hand in running government programs. When the session of Congress ended, Johnson, competing in his mind with the legislative achievements of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Hundred Days," declared grandly, "This session of Congress has enacted more major legislation, met more national needs, disposed of more national issues than any other session of this century or the last."
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Lyndon Johnson